Tuesday, June 5, 2018

The best kind of book reviewer ...


J.C., "Bog standard," The Times Literary Supplement (May 18, 2015), p. 36

image from
Excerpt:
[Anthony] Burgess was almost forty before he published a novel, Time for a Tiger (1956); he wrote another fifteen in the decade that followed, including two under the authorship of "Joseph Kell". Kell's second novel, Inside Mr. Enderby [see], the opening instalment of what would become The Enderby Quartet, was reviewed in the Yorkshire Post -- by the real Anthony Burgess.
It's indecent, you say, but the reviewer did the decent thing and delivered a hatchet job on Kell's book ... The emetic mode continued: Inside Mr. Enderby "may well make some people sick, and those of my readers with tender stomachs are advised to let it alone".  ...
As for his [Burgess's] mischievous review of Inside Mr. Enderby, it led Gore Vidal to remark: "He is the first novelist in England to know that a reviewer has actually read the book under review".  ... 


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